


Embodiment

by versaphile



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Angst, Astral Projection, Body Dysphoria, Body Sharing, Body Swap, Body Swap With A Cat, Character Study, Confusing pronouns, Consent, Crying, Cunnilingus, David Haller POV, Dom Sydney "Syd" Barrett, Edging, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional release, Episode s2e04: Chapter 12, F/M, Hair Pulling, Kissing, Like the softest ever D/s, Marathon Sex, Metaphysics, Mild D/s, Mutants, Oral Sex, Orgasm Denial, Overstimulation, Panic Attack, Pet Names, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Possessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Praise Kink, Protectiveness, Queer Het, Reverse Het, Season/Series 02, Smut, Sub David Haller, Sydney "Syd" Barrett POV, Teasing, Telekinesis, Telepathy, Touch-Starved, Vaginal Sex, hair mussing, post episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 07:10:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14563728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versaphile/pseuds/versaphile
Summary: "Sometimes I feel like I have long hair. Like, from when I was you. And it's not like I just remember having it. I reach for it to brush it out of my face, and it's just not there."After Syd put him on a guided tour of her life, David wants to share something in return. Or: Embodiment is complicated when you have an amorphous sense of self and you want to be your girlfriend.Set between "Chapter 12" and "Chapter 13", somehow. *handwaves*





	Embodiment

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Elenca and Mossomness for betaing!

“I can’t stop thinking about what it felt like to be you.”

David hadn’t meant for the admission to slip out now, though he knew he’d have to tell her eventually. No secrets, that’s their rule, and he’s been holding on to this one for a while now. 

Syd stops in the hallway of Division 3 and sits upright, licks her paw and grooms her face. “Still?” she asks.

He should probably be more embarrassed about this. It wasn’t like their body swap had lasted for very long: a couple of hours, most of which he'd spent in stunned shock, certain that he’d finally lost what few marbles remained after six years in Clockworks. But days, weeks, a year he can’t remember later, he’s still brushing the memory of her hair out of his face. He still dreams of being her, still wobbles in confusion before remembering where his center of gravity actually is. 

“Does that happens to everyone you switch with?” he asks. “Does it happen to you?”

When they talked about the swap by the lake in Summerland, a month and also thirteen months ago, he’d confessed everything but she hadn’t given much away. But then she was already used to changing bodies; he was the only one between them who had lived in ignorance about his powers.

“Not really,” she says, and looks up as one of the child soldiers reaches down to scratch behind her ear. She leans against the boy’s hand and purrs. Her tail flicks at the tip.

“Do you still feel like a cat when you change back?” 

“I always feel like myself.”

“Except certain impulses,” he teases.

“Only when I’m inside,” she says, tolerantly. “It’s temporary. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What does it feel like to be a free-floating consciousness?”

David’s never thought to describe himself that way, but he supposes she has a point. He left his body floating peacefully in Cary’s submersion tank, just as Syd left hers playing with Kerry and a feather duster.

“I think we’re both free-floating consciousnesses,” he offers.

“That’s not an answer.”

David fails to shrug his shoulders. “Floaty?” Before she can narrow her cat eyes at him, he tries again. “Disconnected.” 

He moves his hand, or rather he thinks about moving his hand, but he doesn't know if his body is actually receiving the command. What it's doing without him. There's no feedback. Not so much a missing limb as a missing everything, yet he's still able to experience the world around his perceptions. 

How does he even sense things when he’s a free-floating mind? He can hear the footfalls of the guards on their patrols, smell the metal and concrete of the hallway, feel the soft fur on Syd's cat body. But he does it with no body, no network of nerves to register touch and vibration, no chemical receptors in his nose and tongue, no rods or cones to catch the wavelengths of light—

Maybe he shouldn't have brought this up. His grasp on reality is already so beyond tenuous that it's actively disruptive.

Surely some of the others must remember what it’s like to be her. There could be dozens of people out there haunted by the brush of her hair against their cheek.

Maybe it’s just him. He does have a somewhat amorphous sense of self. It’s something he’s learned to cope with if not accept: not knowing the point where his jumbled mind ends and his jumbled reality begins. What reality even is at all. It’s a lot to unpack at the best of times, and it’s never been the best of times.

“Does it bother you? Feeling like me?”

David hesitates. This is the reason he waited so long to tell her. But after she put him on a guided tour of her life, after she brought him so deep into her truth, he feels the need to give her something in return.

She probably won’t think it’s weird. Or at least no more weird than the rest of their deeply weird existence.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he admits, and wonders if his face is blushing back in the tank. “It really, really doesn’t.”

She stops, one paw frozen in the air, then puts it down. Cocks her head like she’s listening, but he knows she’s thinking instead. Or maybe listening to her thoughts, the way he sometimes finds himself listening to his own.

“Syd?” he asks, after she’s been quiet for too long.

She blinks slowly; the slow blink is a sign of contentment and trust in cats. “We’re going back to the lab.” 

It’s not a question. 

He opens his eyes and reacquaints himself with physical existence. The cloying sweetness of strawberry, the heavy weightlessness of floating in dense liquid. His lungs expanding as he breathes and the way it makes his skin stretch. The sound of the glucose sloshing against his ears. 

Even though he hasn’t given it much thought before, he can’t stop thinking about it now: the difference between disembodiment and embodiment. Between drifting without mass and displacing mass. It’s nothing like the Astral Plane or the white room; in those unreal place he still feels whole, brings the experience of his body with him somehow. Could he--

The dome opens suddenly and he yelps, covers his groin as Cary, Kerry, and Syd peer down at him. He’s definitely blushing now, flushed hot from his forehead to his navel.

“Kerry, you’re making him uncomfortable,” Cary chides.

“What are you gonna do about it?” Kerry challenges, because she doesn’t live inside him anymore, he lives inside her. David’s noticed them working on her life skills and how it’s made her bolder. He often finds himself relating to Kerry, to the experience of having to force himself to exist as a real person. He’s jealous because she’s way ahead of him and he’ll probably never catch up. 

Well, except for the food stuff: he’s an expert at eating and going to the bathroom. It’s not much but he’ll take it.

Syd holds out a towel, blocking the view of both the twins. David accepts it gratefully as he clambers out of the tank and wraps it around himself.

“Ugh, so sticky.” He can already feel his hair solidifying. “I’m gonna...” He waves in the direction of the lab shower and walks towards it, leaving tacky footprints across the floor. When he gets into the blessedly private area, he’s startled to find the cat sitting on the changing bench, staring at him with great interest.

“Um.” He squints at the cat. “Syd?”

Her voice comes from back out in the lab where he left her. “David? You okay?”

“Never mind.” He shakes his head, wondering if he’s getting too paranoid or if this is actually a perfectly rational response to having his girlfriend occasionally inhabit a cat. 

Probably the latter. He hopes.

He shoos the cat out of the shower room before he drops the towel.

Syd is waiting for him when he emerges, clean and dressed; as he approaches her, he sees a speculative gleam in her eyes. 

"Come on," she says, nodding her head towards the hall. 

They walk together back to their room, side by side, the necessary distance apart. It so natural to be this way that it doesn't feel like they've been apart for a year. A year he doesn't remember but she does.

A year is a long time. It's was how long they were together in Clockworks, holding hands through a scarf, sitting facing each other in separate chairs, pressing close together only in reflections and dreams. Their romance of the mind, so pure and innocent, so constrained at every turn.

But they've found ways to free themselves of every constraint. To be distinctly unpure. He's not sure yet what she has in mind, but he's eager for it anyway. 

They used to do this anywhere they happened to be together, because all the privacy they need is in another plane of existence. But it was too awkward for the others to notice the two of them staring into the middle distance for a few seconds and realize that they had just spent hours having sex. 

So now, even though they don't have to, in the privacy of their room they kick off their shoes, lie down on their shared bed with a long pillow between them, and only then does he bring them to the white room.

Syd touches him first, bringing her hand to his cheek before sliding it down his neck; he can feel his pulse against her fingers. The ability to touch is still a marvel for both of them.

Her lips replace her fingers, nuzzling and tasting him. She's crouched over him on the bed, and when he tries to reach for her she pushes his hands back down.

 _Ah_ , he thinks. And _yes_.

They're wearing white versions of the same clothes they're wearing back in Division 3, and Syd seems in no hurry to change that. Instead she teases the bare skin at his shirt collar, savors his neck, his jaw, his mouth. She musses his hair and rubs his scalp as she presses him down with her body.

"Still feel disconnected?" she asks, barely more than a whisper in his ear.

He grins, turns his head to touch his nose to hers. "Never with you."

She kisses him, long and deep, then pushes herself up. Her knees straddle his waist and he feels like an offering presented for her to claim. 

She takes his hands and brings them to her body, guides him to caress her through her clothes. Her strong thighs, the flare of her hips, the softness of her belly. Her breasts, perfect in his hands. 

"Let me..." he sighs, pleads, aching to escape their clothing, to feel nothing but skin against skin.

"Is this what you want?" she asks him, as she guides one hand under her shirt, as he pushes the fabric up. "To touch me all over? To taste me? Fuck me?"

He swallows. "Please."

She smiles down at him, knowing. "Babe. I think you want more than that."

Her slow blink. The gleam in her eyes. His mind goes blank, then races.

The white room is the one place they have complete control over, where their desires can manifest into something close to reality. All they have to do -- all _he_ has to do -- is will it.

He still needs to ask her first. Would never--

"Can I?" he asks, hesitating with a stomach full of butterflies. 

Syd was expecting the question; she's prepared for it. "Of course you can, baby. You just have to beg me for it."

He bites his lip, afraid and excited and not sure what part of his fantasies he wants first. Does he want to change himself or for them both to switch bodies? For her to be him? Would that be too weird?

He doesn't want to ask too much. 

There was nothing romantic about their first kiss. It was an act of desperation on his part, flinging himself at her because he couldn't bear the pain of losing her forever (because he was never getting out of Clockworks, he was a lifer and she deserved to be free); it was a violation of her boundaries followed by immediate and deadly consequences as she lost control of his powers. 

He regrets even more their second kiss, their first time. He wasn't fully himself with her, certainly wasn't himself when he created the white room, when he dragged her here without permission.

He's fucked up so much. If there's any chance this isn't what she wants...

"Are you sure?" he asks, uncertain.

She breathes out, leans down and kisses him sweetly. "Maybe I've thought about that day, too."

"Oh," David says, and smiles up at her. She smiles back and it's like the sun, warming him all over. She lets him hold her, lets him kiss her again, again, each time more desperate.

She pulls back at last, hushing him, stroking his cheek to calm him. "Good boy," she says, making his heart sing like a plucked string. "So good for me."

 _Yes_. He buries his face against her neck. "Please," he begs.

"Tell me," she says, lilting. "You want to feel my body? Live under my skin? Feel my heart beating in your chest? Tell me, baby."

He falters, his eyes damp. It's so hard to get the words out, to find the words for what he's been craving, for what some essential part of himself can't forget and can't understand. 

Is it physical? Their bodies are so different: he's been wiry since adolescence, muscled but slim, any physical softness long since eroded away. Is it her softness that made it feel so right to be her: her skin, the curves of her hips, her long hair, her breasts?

Maybe it's mental. He saw Syd's whole life and knows she was never soft, not where it counted. She's a survivor, strong at the broken places. Even when she's someone else, she's still herself. With that first kiss, with their swap, a psychic bond formed between them; maybe her mental cohesion is so much stronger than his own that she left an imprint in him, too -- like stepping onto concrete that wasn't fully dried.

Or maybe it's just love. He loves her so much. Too much. He can't help it.

His heart feels like it's going to beat right out of his chest, but that's not his heart. That's not his chest. Nothing in this room is actually real. It's just a construct, just ideas, signals sent through firing neurons. They're both free-floating consciousnesses, minds woven together in the dark. The unreality of it dizzies him, but he holds on to it. 

"Can we share you?" he asks, finally. 

Syd takes that in. "Do you want to be in control of both of us?"

"No, I--" He takes a breath. "I want to feel what you feel. So we can be..." He trails off.

"Closer?" she offers.

"Closer," he echoes. So close they can't be pulled apart, that he can't be taken from her again. That one of them can't lose a year and the other can't be forced to wait alone, heartbroken. It's not enough that she has a compass that can always find him; he doesn't want to have to be found.

She takes a moment to consider, then makes her decision. "Okay, babe. When you're ready. Come inside."

David takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

He's used to leaving his body behind; he doesn't need Cary's tank to do it. But he's not leaving anything this time. Instead he pushes his apparent body away, lets it fade back into the nothingness it came from. He disembodies and his awareness remains in place.

Free of the boundaries of his senses, he sees her, and she's so beautiful.

He moves without moving, drawn to her like a falling star to Earth. Her gravity pulls him in and captures him, alters him to fill her shape.

She (he) breathes in with a gasp, opens her (his) eyes. "David," she says, and (the idea of) his lips and tongue are pulled along with hers. 

She rolls onto her back on the bed, alone but as far from alone as she's been since she left her mother's womb. 

_He feels the weight of her breasts first, heavy on her chest, pushing back against every breath. Then her clothes: the way her shirt pulls in odd ways, the stretch of her skirt around her thighs, the cling of her leggings, the taut band of her bra._

She feels him alive under her skin, his heart beating ghostly against her own, rabbit-fast. 

_He’s in her body; it's strange but so, so familiar, slipping back into her after too long._

She is suffused by him, drunk on him.

_He's carried this low dissonance since his last day at Clockworks, just one more noise in his head, and now it's gone like a dial clicking off._

She lifts her hand and feels him staring at it through her eyes.

"Wow," she sighs, her voice but his thought. 

She riles, her instinct for self-control disturbed, but she feels his regret and calms herself. She's in control but they're still sharing, and she doesn't want to silence him.

"It's okay," she says aloud. "Talk to me."

She feels him tugging at the muscles in her face, and knows the expression he's trying to make. Knows it from the outside and now the inside: his wide eyes, his amazement, his baffled confusion. His vulnerability has always made her tender for him: her delicate, defenseless puppy with the power to break the world.

She wraps her arms around herself to hold him, soothe him. Strokes her sides with her hands. His heartbeat slows until it matches hers, until they're synchronized.

"Good boy," she breathes, as he settles within her. "Come on. Talk to me, baby."

"I'm here," he says, almost forcing the words through her mouth. "Syd."

"I know," she says. She can feel his excitement growing as his shock subsides. She can feel the swell of his happiness, transmuted into her own by the way her stomach clenches and her chest rises. She didn't know what to expect from his request and it's clear he didn't really either, but...

"Yes," she tells him, answering his unasked question. She wants this too. She's giving him shelter inside her, but what she receives in return...

She'd thought it was enough to hold him in her memories, in the false maze of her life. To show him every wound, every bruise, and teach him how she uses her pain to survive. She did it to protect him because for all his power he hasn't been able to protect himself. She lost his child-self on the astral plane, she nearly lost his mind to the Shadow King, and if she can believe what he's told her, she lost a year of him to her own future self.

Fuck her future self. He's hers _now_ and she's not losing him to anyone ever again.

She feels him shiver inside her, reacting to her desire, the dominance in the tension of her body, in her chemistry. Even in the narrow confines of Clockworks she saw this need in him: how he responded to her anger, how he sought her approval. It's part of what makes their love so strong despite everything in their lives trying to break it.

"You like that?" she murmurs, shifting her hold on herself into a caress. Running her hands up and down her body and letting him feel it. She wants to share her pleasure with him, reward him with it.

"Please," he begs. She can feel his desire rising to match hers, his arousal a different shape than her own. Focused in his chest, his groin; less diffuse. 

"Tell me how it feels," she orders him, as she slides her hand under her skirt, her tights, her panties. She knows what her body likes, knows her own pleasure and David's. But she's never been able to share like this before.

She curls her fingers, showing him the shape of her mound, and she's intensely aware of her cunt. It's already hot and slick, primed for him, anticipating the hard push of his cock. He's not going to be fucking her, though, not when he's already deep inside her. 

She feels her fingers twitch involuntarily as he strains to press inside her, strains to hold back and obey. She teases him by parting her fingers and touching to either side of her folds, so close but not close enough. He pushes a groan of frustration through her throat.

"I want to make you feel good," he whines.

"I already feel good," she replies, and laughs as his frustration sends a flush through her chest. "Patience," she warns him, and stills herself until he settles.

She slips off the bed and strips, taking her time, teasing both of them with little touches here, there. He's restless, impatient, but tractable as always. He wants to be good for her, wants to give her everything, even too much. Her power over him is a heady thing and she has to sip it carefully.

She walks over to the long mirror and lets him see himself in her. 

"Go on," she tells him, giving him permission to use her hands, to touch. 

She remembers how he spoke so longingly of being her in those first days at Summerland. At the time she'd thought it was that he’d finally been able to have what he’d been denied for so long, but she should have known better. David has never been like the other men she's known, never tried to take more than she would willingly give. At least when he was fully himself.

Like a typical man, though, he starts with her breasts, cupping them against her body, weighing them like gold. He pinches her nipples and is surprised by how they crinkle up, despite having made them crinkle so many times.

"It's different from the inside," he protests, feeling her amusement. He tries to kiss one nipple and he can't because she takes her mouth back to laugh at him. She can feel his happiness and loves him for it.

When she gives back control, he caresses all the skin he can reach, seeking out the sensitive places he's found before, searching for new ones. He's focused now, trying to learn her so he can be a better lover to her. It strikes her then that despite being together for over two years, they've only had a handful of weeks to learn each other's bodies.

Of course, that's a handful of weeks during which they could spend an almost infinite amount of time in another plane of existence. She just has to make sure they survive in the real world so they can have a lifetime of infinities.

A pinch at her ribs draws her back.

"Am I boring you?" David asks, his wry expression on her face showing how much her mind had drifted.

"I was just thinking," she says, casually. "It's not really fair for you to have all the fun. And I said I'd been thinking about the day we swapped."

David's body hadn't been a good place to be, not then. What she actually keeps from that day are nightmares, but he doesn't need to hear that. It’s really their conversation on the dock that she’s thinking of, and how she'd teased him. She teases him again now, bringing her fist down and pretending to jack off his cock.

His blush flushes hot across her face. She stares into the mirror defiantly, staring herself down as much as him. She's so tempted to keep him inside herself forever that she knows she has to split them apart.

"Bring your body back, but stay in mine," she orders.

She feels a flash of his power -- so little compared to what he's capable of -- and sees him sitting on the bed, naked, eyes open but vacant.

"Creepy," she says, walking over to him. He's like a doll waiting to be posed. Or possessed.

She wonders suddenly if they could share for real, with their real bodies. In her real body, when he leans too close she feels ants crawling all over her skin. In his real body, a lifetime of restraint is all that stops him from accidentally breaking the world. But if they do it together, if they're two minds in one...

Maybe someday. When the world isn't busy ending around them. When they can spare more than a few seconds for infinity.

"Okay," she says, bracing herself. "Now move me into that, and you stay in here."

She can feel his reluctance. It's a tension in her back, her shoulders. 

"David," she chides, but gently. "I'll still be right here with you. And I thought you wanted us to swap."

Love is like a warm bath. Stay in too long and it makes you soft.

"David," she says, firmly this time. The tension ebbs.

A pause and then--

It doesn't physically hurt. It's not pain that he feels when he moves her out of her own (unreal) body and into his own. But it's a gut punch all the same: a missing limb reattached and then torn away again. 

He was wrong. It wasn't that he missed being her -- though he did truly miss being her. What he missed even more was being _whole_. And it horrifies him to realize what whole means.

"David," his own voice says, worried, and he realizes he's sitting on the floor, Syd's body crumpled like hers was the empty doll and not his. "David? What's wrong?"

He looks up at himself, at Syd looking down at him through his eyes. He's seen himself from the outside so many times: walked through memories, swapped minds, disembodied his consciousness and hovered over himself. It never gets any less surreal. 

"I'm sorry," he says, her voice strange from the tightness in his throat.

She sits down with him on the floor, takes his hands. "What are you sorry for?"

He shakes his head and his hair brushes his cheek. "I shouldn't have-- It was selfish."

"Hey. Hey."

At the repetition he meets her eyes. His own eyes, but he looks so different with her inside him, and he realizes how utterly she wears his body, how her soul shines through. She's used to being in other people and she's always herself in them.

"It wasn't selfish," she tells him. "I wanted to share this with you. I still want to."

No more secrets. He promised her. But this one... He’s so ashamed. He pulls up his knees, hides his face against them, behind the curtain of his hair. 

“David,” she says, with his voice but her familiar tone. 

When he doesn’t respond, can’t find his words or break the knot in his throat, she wraps her arms around him and holds him. From the outside, his body feels hard and angular, the stubble on his cheeks coarse. Syd in his body is so much larger than he is in hers. He wonders how she can find any comfort in him at all.

No. _Stop it_ , he tells himself, remembering his rational self, trying to dig that part of himself back up so it can save him. He hasn’t been able to. He’s tried, even before the orb took him he tried. 

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” he finally admits.

The sound she responds with isn’t quite a laugh, but it’s close enough to one that he looks up, unable to believe that she would mock him. But she’s looking at him with empathy, not cruelty.

“We’re all broken, baby. Every one of us.” She strokes his hair. “I love you. Nothing’s gonna change that.”

He wants to believe her. He does believe her. It still feels like he has to cut his chest open to get the words out.

“Being in you, part of you. It felt so... _familiar_ and I thought it was because we’d...” He gestures between them. “Then the moment you left...” He swallows, forces himself on. “I miss him, sometimes. How awful is that? To miss that _thing_? It was a monster, an actual monster and now I’m helping him because I have to save you. I can’t get rid of him, and part of me is— is _glad_ , and what if I made myself think you were real just so I could convince myself to let him—“ He takes a ragged breath.

She still has her arms around him. She’s still stroking his hair. He tries to resist for one second longer, but can’t; he turns in her embrace and holds her back.

He’s still crying when she kisses him. Light kisses, almost chaste, breaking the tracks of his tears. Then a kiss to his lips, another, and it’s enough to make the tears slow, stop. He still feels torn open inside, but she kisses down his neck, pressed her mouth to his collarbone, and it’s like a thread sewing through him, pulling the wound closed.

He looks at her, uncomprehending. His own blue eyes smile back at him.

He kisses her back, something in him finally given permission to let go. Suddenly he’s desperate to feel her, to be had by her.

"Syd," he breathes against her mouth. "Please." He doesn't even know what he's begging for, but he's begging all the same.

She reaches down and picks him up, and yeah, okay, maybe there is something to his body being physically larger and stronger than hers. His toes curl as she carries him like he's nothing, light as air, and a sharp breath forces itself into him as she lays him down and crawls over him.

She proceeds to slowly take him apart. Where he touched in curious exploration, she delves with mastery, using her knowledge of her own body to overwhelm him. He squirms under her hands, her mouth, pushing in for more and then pulling away so she can pull him back again. When she moves down between his thighs, pushes them apart, he trembles at the exposure. 

_Is this how she feels when I...? How does she stand it?_

Her stubble is the good side of painful, a contrast to the wet heat of her mouth as she feasts on him. He finds himself reaching down for her, pulling at her short, wild hair, urging her on. His arousal rises like waves in a storm, each cresting higher until the last one breaks and crashes down. She doesn't stop but drives him through it with her hands and mouth, sucking on his clit as he clenches around her fingers. She doesn't stop until she's drawn out every aftershock, until he whines in protest.

She rises up, her face sticky with his slick, her hair perfectly wrecked. She leans down to kiss him and she tastes like her body, like herself, and he chases every drop until he only tastes himself in her.

There's a familiarness to the lethargy that suffuses him after his climax, but it's not enough to smother the fire still burning in him for her. He needs to be joined with her again, and if he can't be inside her, she can be inside him. He pushes her down against the bed, holding her with his weight and his kisses, and reaches down between her legs.

There's a surreal moment as he takes hold of her cock and for the first time in his life, he's holding it from the wrong direction. It makes his head swim, disturbs him because this is his own cock and despite everything they've already done, he isn't prepared for what that means. But then he looks up at her face again and even though she's wearing his face, it's her. It's Syd. And none of this is real and all of it matters, and she wants this, he _wants_ this.

Before any more thoughts can assault his already-battered mind, he sinks himself all the way onto her cock.

 _Oh._

He can't focus on anything but the presence of her inside him, hard and hot and deep into the core of him. A welcome violation, more intimate than he'd ever realized from the other side.

Her touch brings him back, tugs him out of his astonishment. He tries to remember what to do, what she does with him, and starts by clenching himself around her. She breathes in sharply and it's her gasp, her arousal that he's drawn to now. He wants to be good for her.

"Come on, baby," he says, in imitation of her, as he rocks his hips. He focuses on his borrowed body, forces his mind to fit the shape of it, to adapt. It's his breath in his lungs, his muscles tight in his belly and thighs, his cunt throbbing and stuffed full of her.

Forget everything else: this is what he's craved: to be held in her shape, her senses; to live under her skin and feel her heart beating in his chest. He drowns in the experience of it, in his embodiment in her, as he takes her hand and sucks her still-slick fingers. 

"Fuck me," he begs her, even as he's already fucking himself on her, riding her to seek the bruise and burn of each thrust.

Her hands grab his hips as she thrusts up, and fresh pleasure spikes through him at the impact. 

"More," he gasps.

She holds him as she flips them over, and then she's covering him, fucking him, and it's all he can do to hold on to her. She's relentless, her mouth as bruising as her hips, her grabbing hands molding him into what she wants. His mind flashes with remembered sensation of how it felt to pour himself inside her, and he feels almost as fully conquered now. She's taken him over so completely but all he wants to do is give her even more.

"Syd," he sobs, clawing at her back, clinging to her even as the force of her thrusts flatten him against the bed.

She groans and stops kissing him long enough to meet his eyes. There's so much want in her, so much fire it sears him like a brand.

She comes inside him, burying herself deep, pressing their flesh together as if she wants them to be one again, too. Her arms are around him, pulling him so tight he can hardly breathe. He teeters on the edge of a second climax as her cock throbs in him. She doesn't soften, doesn't let go.

"Syd," he begs again, frustrated at being so close, not understanding why she's denying him.

She eases her hold and kisses him, rocks slowly against him. The stimulation isn't enough to carry him over, and his arousal eases back. He whines with need and tries take his satisfaction for himself, but she stills him. She moves when he stops, and stops when he moves. 

When he reaches for his clit, she flips him over and holds his wrists behind his back.

"Be a good girl," she tells him, then releases him.

She pushes back inside, the change in position a revelation. He squirms and grabs at the bed, feels and hears the lewd noise of each thrust; her come has made him even wetter inside.

She takes her pleasure from him again, denies him again, and when he can string a single thought together it's this: that he was wrong about her, too; that she's as affected by being him as he is by being her. That she loves it: being him, being male, being larger and stronger. Being the one to fuck instead of being fucked. 

She's claimed his body as her own, claimed _him_ as her own, and she doesn't want to give him up.

_There are certain impulses I have to resist._

He's nearly delirious with need, and wonders if that makes him the feather duster.

She flips him over again, kisses him, lets him cling to her. Her come has dripped out of him enough to slick his thighs, and she ruts her still-hard cock between them; the teasing only makes his cunt clench hungrily for her. He whines and pleads but she's so gently cruel in her refusals. He feels lost in a haze, in the blur of his body and hers, every boundary between them permeable.

He's on his knees, head bowed for her, her cock on his tongue, in his throat. He's on his back and she's sucking at his breast, and his whole body feels hot, swollen, oversensitized.

"Please," he begs, reduced to tears. "Please, please, please." He feels like he's back in her maze, desperately trying again and again to find understanding, to find release.

She pushes back inside him, fucks him slowly. He's been denied so long he doesn't even know if he can come anymore. It hurts and it’s so good he doesn’t want it to stop. 

When she grinds her thumb against his clit, he tries to push her hand away. But of course it’s only when he breaks that she shows him mercy. She brings her thumb back and frigs him, hard and sweet and just right because of course she knows; she’s showing him that both their bodies are hers now, that all of him is hers, that she decides: not him, never him.

And she's decided. Finally, finally. 

He’s a wreck when she’s done with him, trembling, eyes wet, clinging to her like letting go would mean falling forever. She holds him, soothes him, like she always does. 

"Back with me?" she asks. She's tired too, exhausted.

He manages a sound that's in the vicinity of yes. Tries to catch his breath. "Did you like being me?" he rasps, hoarse from begging, screaming, crying.

"I could get used to it. I like it more than being a cat." When that makes him laugh she smiles. "You better, baby?"

He takes stock of himself, of his mind. The panic, the grief, the terror of himself had been all-consuming. He knows they'll come back (they always come back) but for now they've been cast out, disembodied. Pulled out of him with a kiss.

She's saved him so many times. He just wants to be able to save her, too.

"Yeah," he says, and kisses her. He doesn't feel like he's going to fall anymore.

They'll have to go back soon, leave the white room and go back to their own, actual bodies. But not yet. He wants to stay here a little longer: in her arms, in her skin. He doubts he'll ever feel whole or solid the way she does, the way other people do. But when he's as close to her as he can get, he feels almost like he's real.


End file.
